Description
UKRI Policy Fellowship: Bridging the evidence gap in age-friendly environments.How do we identify and replicate what works, and for whom, to create sustainable age-friendly communities?
The challenge: The UK's ageing population poses significant challenges for the NHS and the delivery of other public services. Age-friendly environments, as outlined by the World Health Organisation (WHO) are crucial for healthy ageing and complementing public health and social care services. While there is a growing global and UK age-friendly movement, limitations in the evidence landscape have created a gap between research and policy. This fellowship will seek to bridge that gap.
The fellowship has three strands of work to be delivered concurrently over the project.
1. Identify and define the gap
Objective: To gain understanding of the current state of evidence relating to evaluating age-friendly practice.
Working with the WHO and academic partners, we will build on the existing evidence and identify next steps. We will identify age-friendly cities and communities (AFCC) programmes that can showcase different levels of engagement with evidence-informed age-friendly policy development. Part of this process will be a review of previous approaches with the aim of looking back to move forward and producing innovative future-focussed solutions.
2. Bridge the gap
Objective: To identify routes or strategies to improving decision making on age-friendly investments.
To understand what policymakers need to know, a comprehensive stakeholder mapping will be completed to identify key actors in the AFCC policy and evidence landscape. This will be followed by an analysis of decision-making approaches to understand how communities can adapt initiatives and programmes to their own context. The output will be the identification of new approaches to knowledge mobilisation, supported by the development of decision-making tools, that will bridge the gap between evidence and policy decision-making.
3. Sustain the bridge
Objective: To inform future research and strengthen links between academics, policy makers and practitioners.
Globally and nationally networks of researchers exploring AFCC are emerging. The fellowship will support the development of the Global Network of Age-friendly Futures Researchers (GNAFFR). Further we will work to convene academics in the UK working in this field and strengthen the future research agenda for AFCCs. In carrying out the fellowship we will draw on support from the current UKRI Policy Fellows cohort and alumni.
How the fellowship works: Funded by the UKRI and employed by the University of Manchester, Dr Patty Doran is working with the Centre for Ageing Better from February 2026 to July 2027 on this What Works Innovation Fellowship, part of the UKRI Policy Fellowships programme.
| Period | 1 Feb 2026 → 31 Jul 2026 |
|---|---|
| Visiting | Centre for Ageing Better |